Jesse Eisenberg has never been better as Mark Zuckerberg, the man/boy who turned and burned most everyone he came in contact with while creating the Internet tsunami that is Facebook. Director David Fincher tones down some of his more overt mannerisms and gets things just right. Even Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker (the creator of Napster) delivers career-defining work.

It’s a sign of the level of film mastery that a subject with so little visual identity could be made into such a rich visual canvas. This is a film without flaws and one that fascinates to the last frame.

It would be wise to read up a bit on the subject, if your knowledge is light in regards to the creation and people behind Facebook. It will greatly enhance your viewing pleasure.

As a coda to the film, Zucerberg’s early partner and only apparent friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), the one he burned nonetheless has a reported personal wealth of over a billion dollars from the undisclosed sum settlement brokered in later half of the film.

Rob Hudson
www.facebook.com/SonyPicturesAUS

Fight Club is a 1999 film based on the 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. It was directed by David Fincher and stars Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. Norton plays the unnamed narrator, who is discontent with his white-collar job. He forms a “fight club” with soap salesman Tyler Durden (Pitt), and becomes embroiled in a relationship with him and a destitute woman, Marla Singer (Bonham Carter).

Palahniuk’s novel was optioned by 20th Century Fox producer Laura Ziskin, who hired Jim Uhls to write the film adaptation. Fincher was selected because of his enthusiasm for the story. He developed the script with Uhls and sought screenwriting advice from the cast and others in the film industry. He and the cast compared the film to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Graduate (1967), with a theme of conflict between Generation X and the value system of advertising. Fincher used the homoerotic overtones of Palahniuk’s novel to make audiences uncomfortable and keep them from anticipating the twist ending.

Studio executives did not like the film and restructured Fincher’s marketing campaign to try to reduce anticipated losses. Fight Club failed to meet the studio’s expectations at the box office and received polarized reviews, becoming one of the most controversial and talked-about films of the year. Critics praised the acting, directing, and themes, but debated the violence and moral ambiguity. Over time, however, critical and public reception towards the film has become largely positive, and the film found success with its DVD release, which established Fight Club as a cult film.

20th Anniversary Screenings of Fight Club
Dendy Coorparoo and Dendy Portside
Saturday March 2 at 6.30 pm and Sunday March 3 at 2.15pm – Rated R
$12 Club Dendy | $15 all other tickets
www.dendy.com.au

The primal questions of marriage comprise the underlying theme of David Fincher’s Gone Girl and shine a light on an uncomfortable and confronting truth: that marriage is inherently beset with elements of emotional manipulation. For the purposes of this story, that theme is naturally taken to a science-fictionesque nth degree and like any propaganda film – for this operates much like a propaganda film – there are seductive elements of truth that draw us in to its unpalatable thesis.

Like the uncomfortable and intrinsic link between sex and violence (which the film also plays on), Fincher exposes this fundamental truth of marriage for the purposes of unsettling us – and it works. But unlike propaganda, his intentions are admirable and twofold: the unsettling nature of the film makes for a great thriller; and it forces us to question the nature of our own relationships. Assuming we arrive at the conclusion that our relationships are a little like Nick and Amy’s (the film’s protagonists). The result is marriage affirming. If not, then watch your back!

The film’s most overt theme, however, is that of the perverse influence of mass media. When Nick (Ben Affleck) stumbles upon the mysterious (presumed killed) disappearance of his beautiful wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), trial by media delivers him a swift guilty verdict and the public obediently falls into line.

In the film’s most exaggerated assumption, social justice becomes actual justice as law and order agencies duly follow suit and Nick finds himself in a spot of bother, especially when the skeletal remnants of his cupboard are publicly exposed and the local penalty for murder is lethal injection. Although this part of the story represents the film’s most tenuous link to reality and, again, borders on science fiction, it works (if only just) within its own universe.

Gone Girl is everything we like a Fincher film to be: it’s tense, intriguing and it’s replete with complex but economically delivered plotlines and characterisations. As such it sits alongside his best work in Se7en, Fight Club and The Social Network.

Stuart Jamieson
www.gonegirlmovie.com